Brainware’s World Tides 2015 (iTunes Store, £1.49) covers the UK, but not France, Canada, and many others. There are several other iOS apps which also offer good UK tidal information.
MR TIDES SOFTWARE MAC
Embarrassingly for Apple, the two apps offered in its Mac App Store – Charts & Tides and Tide Graph – only provide tidal information for the USA. Tides ($10 shareware) still includes superb fine-scale coverage of UK locations, as do its commercial iOS siblings AyeTides (for iPhone) and AyeTides XL (iPad). Thankfully the excellent port to OS X, Mr. Sadly obtaining harmonic constants for locations outside the USA, particularly those in the UK, has proven so troublesome that XTide and Tide Watch now only deliver forecasts for the US. There is now an iOS version which supports the Watch, in Selene’s Tide Watch (iTunes US only, $0.99). Predictions are made using localised sets of harmonic constants to synthesize the complex waveform of tidal flow, much in the way that additive sound synthesis creates a rich sound with harmonics by adding together the waveforms of ‘purer’ simpler sounds (Fourier synthesis). In many other countries, you could have used David Flater’s open source XTide to forecast time and height of tides from the Antarctic Peninsula to Zanzibar. But here in the UK, tidal forecasting is effectively controlled by two government trading agencies, who seem set on taxing that information, and making its access complicated.
Apart from determining whether you walk miles over mud-flats to reach water, the weather often seems to change with the tides.
If you live on or visit the coast, you know how important are the tides.
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